In a few months, after Adam Silver takes over for David Stern as NBA commissioner, he will be faced with the most pressing, critically important issue hovering over the league:

Doing away with divisions.

Yep. Your eyes are rolling, which is already making part of my point before I even get to it.

The issue of scrapping divisions will go before the NBA’s competition committee after this season. Silver already has said he would consider it.

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Essentially, all the fuss is about the state of the Eastern Conference and the nose-in-the-air attitudes of the fans in Western Conference cities who would rather see their teams in the playoffs while the others fade into oblivion. It’s the “why should we have to associate with them” complex. How very SEC of you, NBA fan and NBA writer.

The debate on this, though, has been swift, serious and decidedly one-sided in favor of eliminating divisions. Not me. I’m on board. I’m on board with the concept of divisions creating/keeping regional rivalries, even if some are lukewarm at best. I’m on board with hanging division title banners. A franchise can be proud of winning a division title and still be on record that accomplishing only that isn’t the end goal. And if they are too embarrassed to hang it? Then don’t.

You’re of the opinion that only league championship banners are worth hanging? Well, the NBA champion has come from the Eastern Conference the last two seasons. Doing away with divisions won’t change the fact that if you want to win a title, you likely will have to go through LeBron James and Miami to get it. At least the SEC can point to a bushel of consecutive national titles in football to bolster its point. Of late, the NBA’s Western Conference surely can’t.

So, then, we’re protecting the rights of … what?

If a team in the sad-sack Eastern Conference wins a division title with, say, a losing record but misses out on home-court advantage in the first round because another team finished with a better record, what’s the real harm? Both of those teams would have made the playoffs anyway.

If the NBA were in an annual situation where a division winner had a worse record than a team that didn’t make the playoffs, then we might have a bigger problem. And yet that never happens.

And the NBA has done a good job of tweaking the playoff system enough over the years to recognize the division title winners without compromising the integrity of who is in and how they are seeded. The division abolishment debate, then, is a waste of time.

Therefore, the bigger fish to fry would be the concept of doing away with conferences altogether and awarding the 16 best teams with playoff berths every year. And yet that might be doubly problematic for a league working overtime to achieve more parity.

Superior Western Conference depth isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and that would shut out teams in the East for many years. Playoff teams are predictable enough as it is.

But at least there would be hope for the New Orleans and Minnesotas of the league, franchises tired of lottery balls looking to take that next step, a playoff step, but are finding the road too difficult in a stacked Western Conference.

Conference debate? Maybe. But leave the divisions alone. They aren’t perfect, but they aren’t standing in the way of a playoff solution, either.